Richard E Grant - My Fair Lady

From SX News website

Adam Bub
Wednesday, 01 October 2008

Richard E. Grant makes his musical theatre debut playing the supercilious Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. But, as Adam Bub discovers, he’s quite the opposite.

From appearing in over 60 movies and television series including Gosford Park, Withnail and I and The Scarlet Pimpernel, to writing three novels and directing his autobiographical film Wah-Wah, you’d have thought Richard E. Grant had truly done it all. But in all of his travails, the 52-year-old Swazi-born Londoner has yet to have conquered the bedazzling world of musical theatre – until now.

Playing the pompous phonetics professor Henry Higgins in Opera Australia’s production of My Fair Lady, Grant is justifiably confident in the acting stakes, but becomes modest about his vocal abilities, despite months of singing lessons. “Because the part was written for Rex Harrison, who wasn’t a trained singer, there’s no high seas to reach,” Grant tells SX.

For those who have never seen the 1964 film musical starring Audrey Hepburn, adapted from the original 1950s theatre hit starring Julie Andrews (based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion), My Fair Lady is a classic Cinderella story about a professor teaching a Cockney flower girl how to be a ‘lady’, only to find himself falling for her spirited personality. It’s a timeless tale, and Grant, who is married to dialect coach Joan Washington, is clearly a romantic at heart. “In all relationships … you’re re-moulded by the other person,” he accedes. “In this play, she transforms him as much as he is transforming her.”

Grant can’t be accused of choosing unexciting projects, recently acting in Madonna’s directorial debut feature Filth and Wisdom. “She was very exact about what she wanted, which is what I’d expected. I’ve known her for 18 years,” he reveals. “She’s the boss, but she’s open to what people offer all the time, which I think is part of the reason for her success. She’s going to continue to surprise, provoke, annoy and enslave people to what she’s doing for as long as she wants to do it.”

When SX last spoke with Grant in 2006, he mentioned that a famous male Hollywood film star was hiding in the closet. While staying tight-lipped about the celebrity’s identity, he rules out those rumours about Tom Cruise. “I’ve been around him,” he says. “It’s certainly not crossed my mind.”

Grant remains passionate about humanitarian causes, especially those that hit close to home. In December 2006, Grant unveiled a $98 million scam where a South African ex-mercenary erroneously claimed to have found the cure for HIV/AIDS, using it in Grant’s homeland of Swaziland, which has the second highest infection rates of HIV/AIDS per capita in the world. Grant and the BBC’s Panorama program caught the phony salesman out on camera. “It wasn’t a choice, it was an absolute inevitability to do something,” he says. “I had three great friends who died of it; if they’d had the drugs that are available now they’d still be here. Unfortunately the quick fix that we expect, at the internet-broadband-speed of which people now live, just hasn’t happened, but hopefully it will in our lifetime.”

Between his eight-shows-per-week schedule, Grant is writing a screenplay, though staying on Bondi Beach may have its distractions, as he cheerfully proclaims: “Whether I’ll be able to keep out of the water in this weather I don’t know.”